She is going to school for the first time this year. Up to now she was still in kindergarten and this is her first year of going to ‘Big School’ with her sisters. This is the fifth time that I have to say goodbye to a little one going to school so you would think that I would have everything under control.

My little mouse is the my child that always test my limits and surprise me. You would think that with five kids and three households with six parents that all need to get along I cannot be surprised anymore. (You would be wrong.) Little Mouse is an old soul and her unique life is a bit chaotic. If all the kids are home the house is full of loud noises, laughter and shouting. If she is the only one home when the other kids are visiting their other parents the house is really quiet. Her life is always going from one extreme to the other. This is her normal.

The other side of her normal is that her mom is either really busy or she has enough time to spend quality time just with her. The first day of school was one of the days where the Little Mouse fell through the cracks of the craziness that is our lives.

We started the day early and where I usually struggle to get her out of bed she was dressed and ready to go before I finished my first cup of coffee. She looked so grown up in her uniform and still so very tiny. She was a bit apprehensive, but mostly excited about finally going to school with her sisters. I was crying buckets in my heart, while still trying to put on a brave face for her. My last little monkey was now out of my hands and hair for at least half of every day. I was feeling sentimental and sad and the hours of the day dragged till the time I could go and pick her up.

At pickup I got a big smile and she asked if she could please go back to school tomorrow too. She loved her teacher, made some friends and even learned how to write. She can’t wait to learn how to read. She has big plans of selling all her teddies so that she could have more money for books. A good first day.

Then everything went crazy. Which is something that happens a lot around here. (Just as explanation. In a household with five kids, crazy is how we roll.)

We picked up all the other monkeys. Everyone had bags full of books that needs to be covered. Every teacher had different instructions so I had to make a quick stop at the shops. I got everyone started on sandwiches and asked them to please not eat the hamburger buns as I’m planning on using them for supper, meaning that they could have some of the other bread. I completely forgot that with the Little Mouse you have to be really specific. She thought that mom said she is not allowed to eat any bread at all. With everything going on I did notice that Little Mouse disappeared but I know she gets a bit overwhelmed and would just go and lie on her bed with a book for a while, so I did not think anything about it. She had a big day and she could get something a bit later. We started covering books and everyone was talking about their classes, friends and teachers and I forgot to ask if she ate anything.

Later that evening when I opened the fridge to make some hamburgers there was one hamburger patty missing. There was also some finger marks in another patty. I asked everyone what happened and then Little Mouse told me I said that she could not have bread so she took a patty out of the fridge and ate it.

Raw.

Just take a moment to think about it.

She took a cold, raw hamburger patty out of the freezer and ate it.

According to her it was not too bad. She did not think that this was a big deal. She followed instructions, she did not eat the buns that I asked them to leave alone, no one was giving her food and she was hungry. So she made a plan.

I did not know if I should shout, laugh or cry. I was so proud of her of making plan, a bit horrified that she ate raw meat and hugely ashamed that I did not feed her.

If you are taking care of a house full of children at one point you have to make peace with the fact that there will always be something that goes wrong.

Little Mouse did not end up in hospital and she had a good first day of school. That is called a success story in my book.

Wow a whole raw patty! I once ate a whole plate of raw sausage as a three year old ad survived!
Well done Little Mouse on your 1st day, my little mouse enjoyed he first day at nursery last week and did well at 6 months, I still hate leaving her though. xxx

It sounds as if you have one crazy household. It’s never easy when a child starts school, but with Little Mouse it must of been hard as she is the last!

At least the raw burger patty did her no harm. Once when my daughter was about three she ate a pile of vegetation that she had picked. One minute she was cooking and making ‘dinner’ for her toys, the next minute the pile had gone and she proudly told me she had eaten it…Of course I had a mini panic meltdown and phoned the Doctor as I was unsure what she had eaten. I had to watch her, but she was fine and never did it again…Although she did have a habit of eating the wax on the outside of mini BabyBels…Children do the strangest things!

I hope your daughter continues to love books and to find school exciting.

It is fabulous that she had a great day at school but, wow, I don’t think I would have known what to have done with the raw burger situation! I guess I would have called NHS Direct! So glad she was OK. Thank you for linking to #PoCoLo